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It was a dark and stormy night, and Guido was walking his pet
aardvark. Ignore me--I'm trying to be creative. I'm under
pressure to write a clever introduction for the author of The
Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books). Richard Florida is
professor of regional economic development at the Heinz School of
Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. In his book, he argues that entrepreneurs, artists and
other innovators belong to a creative class, and woe to cities that
don't recognize it.

What is this creative class, and why
should cities pay more attention?

Richard Florida: There are
three dimensions to creativity: technological creativity, economic
creativity or entrepreneurship and artistic/cultural creativity.
You need all three to prosper, and for too long, we've narrowed
it down to the first two. If you look at the high-tech meccas-San
Francisco; Austin, Texas; Seattle-most have a very dynamic music
scene. Obviously, places that can be comfortable homes to musical
innovators are going to be comfortable homes for risk-takers [of
all kinds].

Different pathway? Such
as?

Florida: There's a
relationship between entrepreneurs and bohemians, in that most of
organized society consider them bad. One woman I quote in the book
says, "Now I know I'm an entrepreneur, but before I just
thought I was a weird person, an eccentric." I'm not
saying that bohemians and entrepreneurs are the same, but that
societies open to risk, to entrepreneurship, to new ideas have the
same underlying characteristics. Forget your stadiums, forget your
downtown malls. You have to build not only a business climate with
tax incentives, but also a people climate, which attracts
innovative, eccentric and sometimes downright weird people. And
those signals say to entrepreneurs "Hey, come on in."

So what can entrepreneurs do to help
their city's creative class rise?

Florida: Entrepreneurs can
do what I've been doing: working with entrepreneurial groups
and technological associations to throw parties, dinners and events
where the entrepreneurial, technology, artistic and cultural
communities can network. [In Pittsburgh,] it's
working-we're realizing we have a lot in common. We're not
just a fractured group of interests. We are a social unit, and we
want to change society and overcome obstacles. We've got to
work together, or we're not going to see the kind of society we
really want.